


Sherlock's Dreamwork: An Abominable Meta

by PlaidAdder



Series: Sherlock Meta [6]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Episode: The Abominable Bride, F/M, M/M, Meta, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-15
Updated: 2016-01-15
Packaged: 2018-05-14 03:54:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 8,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5728672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Having gifted everyone with my preliminary thoughts on “The Abominable Bride” as palimpsest playtime, I’m now watching it again with my eye what I think is the second most fruitful way to approach “The Abominable Bride”: as a dream in which Sherlock’s subconscious attempts to cope with the traumatic and turbulent events of Series 3.</p><p>There's chapters. It got long.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The First Meeting

Having gifted everyone with my preliminary thoughts on “The Abominable Bride” as [palimpsest playtime](http://plaidadder.tumblr.com/post/136870676069/90-minutes-of-palimpsest-moments-or-first), I’m now watching it again with my eye what I think is the second most fruitful way to approach “The Abominable Bride”: as a dream in which Sherlock’s subconscious attempts to cope with the traumatic and turbulent events of Series 3. There's chapters, because it got long. In this chapter, I’m going to talk just about the pre-credits teaser, and about what we might infer from the way Sherlock’s chemically altered brain rewrites his first meeting with John.

The opening scene is a kind of dual reboot, adapting both the opening of Doyle’s _A Study in Scarlet_ and the opening of Sherlock’s _A Study In Pink_. For instance, the opening montage of Watson (battlefield flashbacks intercut with tossing and turning in bed) visually reiterates the opening montage of _Study In Pink–_ same content, same style–while layering Watson’s _Study in Scarlet_  narration on top of it. Once we reach London, however, the visual style calms down considerably and approaches the pace and comparative simplicity of the Granada Holmes series; so now it’s a triple reboot. Then we meet Sherlock.

It’s when Sherlock shows up that the Victorian story first starts behaving like someone’s subjective fantasy; but it’s still subtle, so we can only really pick up on it in retrospect. But if you compare this meeting to either Doyle’s first meeting or the SIP first meeting, you notice the following:

* Sherlock’s self-presentation is completely different. The SIP Sherlock is of course arrogant and brusque, but we can also see that his apparent indifference to John is partly out of fear, or at least a kind of wariness; he’s intrigued, but he’s holding back in a way that tells you he’s not used to making successful connections with other people. TAB Sherlock is completely self-possessed, effortlessly dominates the interaction, knows everything all at once, and shows not an iota of doubt, uncertainty, or apprehension. Watson, meanwhile, is reduced to staring at him openmouthed like a goldfish. 

Now on one level this is scoring a point off the source material; like most contemporary adaptations, _Sherlock_ has gone to great lengths *not* to replicate the one-sidedness of the ACD canon relationship, and so this is almost a kind of parody of the original H/W dynamic. But if we see this as Sherlock’s dreamwork, then it becomes a rather desperate instance of wish fulfillment:

* Sherlock is in complete control of the relationship. It’s his decision to take or leave ‘Watson,’ and he initiates and defines their relationship (”You’ll do,” “We’ll get along splendidly,” “We’ll finalize the details tomorrow night”) without obtaining or asking for ‘Watson’s’ consent. Sherlock’s dream John is given no opportunity to reject Sherlock or to set the terms for their relationship. Thus, the dreamwork version of the meeting alleviates the fear Sherlock still obviously has of John abandoning him by withdrawing from the relationship.

* Sherlock is a perfectly functioning reasoning machine. He deduces everything, right away, from a single glance–no hesitation and no qualifications. Whereas SIP Sherlock opens with “Afghanistan or Iraq?” TAB Sherlock doesn’t ask questions; he reverts to Doyle’s original opening line for him, “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.” Again, that’s a canon reference, but it’s also in keeping with the tenor of the whole interaction: he’s completely self-possessed, supremely confident, and always right. Which is quite different from how Sherlock has actually felt about himself in most of S3, where he is basically never at the top of his game: he was ‘slow’ to deduce Mary’s double identity; he misread the perfume clue in Magnussen’s office and deduced Lady Smallwood instead of Mary; he incorrectly assumed that Mary wouldn’t shoot him; and of course there was the giant fuck-up over Magnussen’s nonexistent vaults.

So the Holmes we meet before the opening credits may be a kind of manic version of ACD canon Holmes; but it’s also Sherlock’s fantasy version of himself as infallible, omniscient, and irresistible. And then Dream Stamford assures him that all the lapses and mistakes and failures of S3 never really happened, because Sherlock has always been perfect: “Yes. He’s always been like that.”


	2. The Client Chair

 

  * So moving on (slowly): This is the scene that lets us know (I mean it should, though most of us are only going to notice it on rewatch) that the case of the abominable bride is actually Sherlock’s very own fix-it fic. Specifically, his drug-fueled subconscious is using the case of the Abominable Bride to retcon “His Last Vow.” However, since it’s the subconscious and since it’s also on drugs, this fix is going to create at least as many problems as it solves.

The key to everything about the Case of the Abominable Bride is substitution. The solution only works in a universe where women can be endlessly substituted for each other. Emilia has to substitute another woman’s corpse for her own body, then substitute her own body for the other woman’s corpse. The women who then carry out the copycat murders have to substitute for Emilia Nicoletti. The Bride identity helps with this because the woman can disappear beneath the dress and the veil; but still, this part of the fantasy suggests that in Sherlock’s world, all women are pretty much the same.

The only exception is Mary, who is apparently one of a kind. As far as we know, she is not part of the secret society of hooded women; and as far as we know, she never puts on the Bride’s dress.

Instead of substituting, she doubles. Here, she appears as the double of the Bride; she’s just wearing black instead of white. And of course the composition of this shot and the positioning of the text clearly suggest that all of this foofaraw around Emilia Nicoletti is just dreamwork camouflage hiding the truth that this dream is telling: for Sherlock, Mary IS the Abominable Bride. 

She’s positioned between them, of course, as she often is in both “Sign of Three” and “His Last Vow.” Black is the color of Assassin Mary. It’s also, in this context, mourning; so instead of being a bride, Mary’s a widow. So Sherlock’s fear that Mary is a lethal danger to John–as indeed she nearly was to him–is encoded in her costume, and in his line about how her perfume spells “disaster to you.”

But there’s a lot of other dreamwork going on here. Mary ‘pretending to be a client’ evokes but transforms one of the most arresting scenes in “His Last Vow,” in which Sherlock just barely stops John from completely losing his shit by making him turn Mary into a client. Sherlock’s mind turns this tragedy into farce by turning Mary’s transformation from Watson’s wife into Sherlock’s client as just an instance of Mary’s “impish sense of humor.” Sherlock also gives himself the invulnerability we saw in the first meeting scene, a fantasy which completely falsifies the actual events of “His Last Vow.” Unlike in S3, Sherlock is able to penetrate Mary’s disguise immediately–because this time, he gets the perfume clue right. 

So far so good, from a wish fulfilment point of view. Sherlock has taken what had to be the most intense and emotoinally complicated moment of his life up to that point and defanged it by turning it into an amusing little joke. But after that it all starts going wrong. We cut from Mary’s repetition of the word “husband” to a shot of the Watsons bickering in the background while Sherlock plays the violin. This recalls the scene at the end of “Sign of Three” where Sherlock plays the violin while John and Mary dance. I’m sure this has been noticed by others before, but **in the TAB scene Sherlock is actually playing the song he played at their wedding in “Sign of Three.”** His painful ambivalence about John’s marriage is starting to materialize: because they’re his substitute parents, he needs them to love each other and stay together, but because he wants to be John’s primary relationship he also wants them to break up.. By playing their wedding song, dream Sherlock is trying to keep them together by literally calling the tune; but it’s clearly not working.

“Sometimes to solve a case one must first solve another,” Sherlock murmurs, right before Lestrade comes in the door. The first case is the Unsolvable Problem of Mary–her presence in their lives is a problem; but because John lovers her, her absence would be an even bigger one–and the second case is the Abominable Bride, which Sherlock is dredging up from “deep” within himself. So this actually makes it pretty clear that the entire Abominable Bride case is being manufactured by Sherlock as a way of coping with his inability to solve the problem of what to do about Mary. For Sherlock, there’s no problem that doesn’t disappear as soon as you have a mystery to solve. He’s hoping it will work the same for John and Mary; they’ll all get along as long as they’re all working on the case together. 

But that wish is doomed, because instead of distracting them from Mary, the Abominable Bride case evokes “His Last Vow” in numerous ways–the most arresting being the fact that the central figure of the Abominable Bride case is a woman with two loaded guns who is totally out of control. While the actual Mary is always presented as grounded and down to earth and sensible, the Bride embodies Sherlock’s view of Mary–post-shooting–as a deadly threat to him as well as John: unhinged, enraged, and completely out of control when it comes to handling her weapon. 

So in the end, it’s not that Mary doubles for the Abominable Bride. Instead, the Abominable Bride is a double for her–a figure that grotesquely merges the bride Mary of “Sign of Three” with the reckless assassin Mary of “His Last Vow.” By creating this double for Mary, Sherlock’s brain is, rather touchingly, trying to split the ‘real’ Mary’s character down the middle, quarantining the undesirable aspects of her characterization in the Bride. This allows him to give John what John claims to want: Mary the loving wife/nurse, untainted by Mary the reckless and lying assassin.

Well, you know THAT’s not going to work long term.





	3. A HIGHER STANDARD

  


 

This one’s about Jim Moriarty. It’s also about _Sherlock_ ’s relationship to its two strongest influences: ACD canon and Granada Holmes. That’s because what Moffat and Gatiss do with Moriarty’s character–much as I have been bitching about it over the past several years–in many ways defines the relationship between _Sherlock_ and its predecessors. Which is why, perhaps, one of the things “The Abominable Bride” MAY have done is allow me to make my peace with the fact that _Sherlock_ is never going to be the kind of show that I keep wanting it to be. Because the bottom line is that Moffat and Gatiss don’t care about the cases. They never have. TAB just makes it obvious.

Spoilers, of course.

I am not a huge Freudian, but one thing I remember about his dream interpretation theory is that everything in a dream is overdetermined. Basically what that means is that any one detail that appears in your dream is there for multiple reasons; each detail is the crystallized form of a half-dozen anxieties or wishes or forbidden desires. The figure of the Bride is a perfect example. I talked in the last one of these pieces about how the Bride is a double for Mary. But the Bride also doubles Jim Moriarty (shot through the back of the head and yet inexplicably survives) and Janine (loved and left, just like Emilia Nicoletti). 

_Sherlock_ itself also overdetermined. It’s informed, obviously, by ACD canon, but also by all the other adaptations and–I think this is especially obvious in TAB–Doctor Who, for which both Moffat and Gatiss are writing. Jim Moriarty’s riff about dust could have come straight out of Twelve’s explanation of the monsters in “Sleep No More;” Sherlock’s desire to “go deeper” is literalized when he starts digging himself into a grave; Twelve also digs himself into a grave while trying to get to the bottom of things in “Hell Bent.” 

So in “The Client Chair” I talked about doubling and splitting. I’m not the first to do that. Both phenomena are very common in Victorian fiction, precisely because so much conformist pressure was applied to everyone–in real life, and in fiction. When your subjectivity meets a strong repressive force with the power to punish you for disobeying it, one response is to split–creating a ‘good’ self, which you show to the public, and a ‘bad’ self, which you indulge in private and in secret shame. In genre fiction, of course, the conflict between good and evil is often really an internal conflict between two halves of a split subject, in which the ‘good’ self overcomes and annihilates the ‘bad’ self. 

In ACD canon, Holmes and Moriarty are doubles, though not equals. Moriarty was created for the express purpose of being Holmes’s nemesis (in ACD canon, “The Final Problem” is Moriarty’s first appearance; Doyle later retconned him into _The Valley of Fear,_ an example followed by nearly all contemporary adaptations) and you can tell from the results. Moriarty is given the same qualities that make Sherlock successful–enormous intellect, detachment, surprising strength, the ability to make other people do his bidding, and the strategic imagination of a grand chess master. Moriarty is as much of a ‘reasoning machine’ as Holmes–if not more so. The major difference between Moriarty and Holmes, in ACD canon, is that Holmes works for the love of the game and the greater good, whereas Moriarty works for the cash and the power. In other words, the danger that Moriarty represents to Holmes, in ACD canon, is an ethical one: Moriarty is what will happen to Holmes if he decides to start serving himself instead of the public. 

The way in which Sherlock and Jim Moriarty double each other is very different. Anyone who’s been following me for any length of time will know that I have never been a fan of what _Sherlock_ did with Moriarty. Jim Moriarty is not a genius; he’s a madman. He’s unstable, irrational, obsessive, volatile, and (for Sherlock) unsettlingly and infuriatingly sexual. He’s not an evil version of Sherlock’s intellect; he’s everything that Sherlock has tried to use his intellect to stifle. Jim Moriarty has no use for intellect–he gets his results through fear and intimidation, and he’s more interested in provocation than in puzzles. That’s why in “Reichenbach Fall” (before TEH retconned it) Jim is able to trap Sherlock precisely by _not_ being clever (he hasn’t found a code that unlocks every door; he’s just corrupted a few people in the right places). Jim’s status as the anti-intellect often prevents _Sherlock_ from functioning like a typical detective show; and in “The Abominable Bride,” he prevents Sherlock from functioning, period. Because one thing we definitely learn from TAB is that Sherlock is fucking _terrified_ of Jim Moriarty. 

Just as, I have already argued, the case in TAB is Sherlock’s attempt to grapple with the problem of Mary, it is also his attempt to grapple with the Final Problem, which in the _Sherlock_ universe is actually the _initial_ problem. Sherlock knows this from the beginning. During his little “the stage is set” speech he describes the upcoming case as “very old;” and in fact in this universe the Moriarty problem pre-dates the Mary problem (in ACD canon it’s the other way around). In the morgue, after he describes the features that connect the case with “Reichenbach Fall”–the public suicide, the gun in the mouth and the blown-out back of the head–he asks, “How did he survive?” He’s well aware of the relationship between Emelia Nicoletti and Jim Moriarty. The only thing Sherlock doesn’t know is that his own brain has created this connection. Introject Moriarty, who is clearly on MUCH better terms with the subconscious and the drives, is fully aware that the Nicoletti case isn’t “real,” that it is in fact just a warped expression of Sherlock’s obsession with him. 

Jim Moriarty, from the point of view of Sherlock’s brain, represents everything that is preventing Sherlock from living up to the “higher standard” that Watson rants about after the “morphine or cocaine” speech. Jim Moriarty is also emblematic of what prevents _Sherlock,_ the show, from living up to the “higher standard” we have for it based on previous Sherlock Holmes iterations. Just like Eleven’s big “don’t ever tell me the rules” speech, Jim Moriarty’s speech when he is finally revealed in the Bride’s outfit sends a message to the viewers: No, the case doesn’t make sense, because it’s not real. So stop complaining to us about it, OK? We suck at casefic. We really kind of do. But that’s not what OUR Sherlock Holmes is about. Cause he’s not a puzzle solver; he’s a drama queen.

TAB spends a long time making this point. At the moment that Sir Eustace’s wife comes to visit them, TAB starts to behave like a Granada Holmes episode. One notices, for instance, that Lestrade’s statement of the case is handled with all that nifty camerawork and the putting of the sitting room into the middle of the action–there are several moments, in fact, where everyone in the 221B Baker Street set is looking straight out at us as if they’re watching television. Very arch, very visually stunning, very cutting-edge. But when Lady Carmichael tells her story, it’s done exactly the way they did it in the Granada adaptations: as a straightforward flashback, dissolving out from the sitting room to the earlier narrative and then dissolving back into the sitting room. I can’t exactly document this right now, but much of that part of the episode is strongly reminiscent to me of the Granada adaptations of “Naval Treaty,” “Dancing Men,” and “Speckled Band.” For a while, this helps preserve the illusion that Sherlock is Holmes–actually in his right mind, actually investigating a real case. If we think about this as Sherlock’s dreamwork, it shows you how desperately Sherlock actually _wants_ to live up to John’s fictional version of him–how much he wishes he could be the super-competent, always-rational, never-at-a-loss detective that Doyle’s readers fell for. He’s always denied this to John; but the investigation phase of TAB is a fantasy in which Sherlock gets to live up to the legend that’s been created for him. UNTIL Jim Moriarty inserts himself into it and fucks everything up.

Every time Jim Moriarty emerges into the Victorian storyline it goes insane. Whenever Sherlock notices a connection between the Nicoletti case and Jim Moriarty, he goes into into a kind of trance which temporarily takes him out of the Victorian world. For a while he can snap right back into it. But from the “miss me?” note onward, the camera work becomes very alienating. In the second scene with Mycroft in the Diogenes Club, everything is suddenly clouded and murky, with dust clogging all the beams of light coming in through the windows. Mycroft asks Sherlock if he’s made a list, and calls Moriarty “the virus in the data”–two signs that the contemporary timeline is bleeding into the Victorian one. And then, when Moriarty actually shows up…oh my brother.

Moriarty tells Sherlock, rather baldly, that he’s his “weakness.” He should have said “weaknesses,” really, because he represents so many things about Sherlock that, on the basis of this dream, Sherlock really believes will destroy him. The list includes:

* Addiction. Sherlock wants to “finish this”–his relationship to Moriarty–but he can’t, no matter how hard he tries. Moriarty’s unkillability, in this context, represents his struggle to stay clean; every time Sherlock thinks he’s defeated his addictions, they come back, sometimes apropos of nothing that makes any sense.

* Emotion. Jim is extremely volatile emotionally, and especially in relation to Sherlock, in whom he has invested quite a bit of his emotional energy. 

* Madness. I think we’ve covered that.

* Sexuality. 

Homosexuality, of course; but also sexuality in general. One of the things that drives Sherlock batshit in TAB is Moriarty’s complete lack of shame and restraint when it comes to his sexual obsessions. When Moriarty tells Sherlock how comfortable his bed is, it’s not just a creepy stalker talking (though it is that); he’s basically telling Sherlock look, _I_ have experienced real pleasure in your bed, in this apartment, in this sitting room. YOU have not, even though you certainly could, and that is just fucking sad. Jim is also not afraid to point out the sexual symbolism and in fact seems to really get a charge out of using it to spook Sherlock.  Everyone in this episode is flinging guns around; but only Jim Moriarty is licking the barrels. Jim’s eating his gun becomes fellatio; and by reenacting his own shooting with what can only be described as glee, Jim is taunting Sherlock by showing him that Jim, unlike Sherlock, is willing and able to take pleasure in sex. Sherlock’s dreamwork tells you that he’s afraid sex will destroy his ability to function mentally: put a dick in your mouth and it will blow out your brain. It’s also telling him that Moriarty is more than happy to sacrifice his intellect for sexual pleasure; *Jim* can eat the gun, smack his lips, and come on back for more.

In that sense, the whole Victorian setting can be seen as Sherlock’s attempt to suppress his own frightening sexuality–something which has become extra-terrifying now that John has married Mary, and to express his desire for John is (he fears) to risk their whole relationship. By going back to Granada, which any of us Granada old-timers will tell you was just constantly abuzz with sexual tension, the show is going back to a time when H/W could never be made canon and therefore had to remain coded. As long as he’s in the world of Granada Holmes, Sherlock never has to worry about *acting* on his sexual desires–in the 1980s, it simply wasn’t possible to do make sex between two men part of the narrative. If he never acts on those desires, then he never has to get into direct competition with Mary, and he will never have to risk of finding out whether he would win or lose. But with Jim Moriarty on the loose…well…good luck with that.

And, as that final little scene shows us, the Granada world is in fact wrong for Sherlock. He tells Watson, in that sitting room scene, that he knows that he would fit right into the modern world, that he’s a man out of his own time. We then get a citation of the closing image of the Granada adaptation’s opening credits: Holmes in his sitting room, looking out of the window at the street below. But whereas the Granada image shows Brett’s Holmes at peace, almost serene, happy in contemplating the world outside and what it might bring into his sitting room today, the Sherlock image is much darker and Sherlock himself looks troubled. He still hasn’t woken up. He’s still separated from his own life and his own world by that pane of glass. He’s been thrown out of the world he thought he knew; and like most non-Time Lords who get temporally displaced, he has no idea how to get back home.


	4. A CHILD IS BEING BEATEN

  * People occasionally ask me for my S4 predictions and I have been demurring because my crystal ball remains cloudy. But this did come to me on the way home from the dentist:

We’re going to find out that Redbeard is not just the name of Sherlock’s dog. And my guess is that Redbeard, in one way or another, is going to turn out to be the answer to a question that “The Abominable Bride” poses:

Who hurt Sherlock?

One of the odd things about the opening of TAB is how MUCH beating is going on. TAB wants us to know that nearly everyone Sherlock is close to as an adult–with the possible exception of Mycroft–has hit him at some point. We see Irene Adler whacking away at him, even though she’s not really in this episode and it’s not really necessary to introduce us to her. We see John attacking Sherlock in “The Empty Hearse.” When Molly Hooper turns out to be part of the Monstrous Regiment, we get a flashback of her slapping him. And although Holmes beating the corpses in the dissecting room is ACD canon, and although “Study in Pink” does show him actually doing this, there is something very sinister in the way the opening of TAB *lingers* on it. We hear the beating as soon as Watson and Stamford enter the morgue; we watch Watson wince in reaction to it; we see Sherlock doing it from two different angles; and when Watson and Stamford come up on him from behind, Sherlock is just whacking away at that dead body as if he’s completely forgotten about the rest of the world. The motion is mechanical, repetitive, and compulsive. 

Freud wrote a famous essay called “A Child is Being Beaten” which, in the words of this [book blurb](http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300071610), “deals with the theoretical problem of how pleasure and suffering become linked.” I will leave it to others to go on about the S&M overtones of this version of John and Sherlock’s first meeting–well, you know, no, I won’t because honest to God, the literal first goddamn thing Sherlock does to acknowledge Watson is **throw him the cane he’s been using to beat the corpse,** and then he’s enormously pleased to see that **John immediately catches it** , thereby signaling (in Sherlock’s fantasy world, anyway) a willingness to respond to Sherlock’s implicit invitation to use it on him. Perhaps this is the significance of the fact that even though Watson’s wound is in the shoulder (John eventually admits this in a nearly inaudible line at the very end of “Study in Pink,” but it’s much more obvious in TAB) he still carries a cane everywhere. But whereas in SIP, it’s all about healing John’s psyche by getting him to give up the cane, here, Sherlock’s subconscious is saying, “I like the look of this man with the cane. Maybe I’d like him EVEN BETTER with TWO canes.”

But I digress.

My point is: when Introject John is probing Sherlock about why he’s ‘always alone,’ he says, “Who made you this way?” From a therapist (which is how Introject John is acting right now; everyone in this episode gets to analyze Sherlock, just as everyone in the HLV mind palace gets to help him survive the shooting), that could mean a lot of things, but certainly it could mean, “From what you’ve told me so far I’m pretty sure you’ve experienced some kind of abuse.” Sherlock denies that anyone “made” him; but then he goes into that little trance state again, and right before the Bride reappears, he murmurs, “Redbeard?”

So I don’t know who or what Redbeard is. But I do have a strong suspicion that all y’all who have been cherishing Sherlock-as-a-survivor-of-childhood-abuse headcanons may be vindicated this year.





	5. BIGGER BROTHER

 

  *  

And now, in our penultimate segment: Mycroft and…well seriously really this goes beyond fat-shaming. 

Let’s get one thing straight: This episode’s use of Mycroft’s ACD-canon “corpulence” is indefensible either from an ethical or an artistic standpoint. I am going to talk about what I think it was intended to do; but I do not for one moment want to let Moftiss off the hook for the way their interpretation of Victorian!Mycroft uses fatness to disgust, horrify, and revolt the viewers. Mycroft is mocked for his “girth” by Sherlock; but his size is also used symbolically, to represent Sherlock’s anxieties and resentments about his older brother. Either way, Moftiss have hit just about all the judgmental stereotypes about fat people: that we’re gluttonous, that we don’t exercise, that we have no control over our behavior, and that we take some kind of perverse pleasure in making ourselves sick. The “bet” banter between John and Sherlock is all based on the premise that fat=death, an equation that has been challenged by recent medical research. Is it damaging to fat people to validate all this crap? Yes. Does it make portions of this episode very hard to watch, if you are a person of size? Absolutely. Do Moftiss give a shit about how their fat fans, or other fat people, feel about this? Absolutely not. Zero fucks about that were obviously given during writing and production. Does this piss me off? Sure. Has my being pissed off at Moffat and Gatiss ever stopped me from watching “Sherlock” before? Not so far. There’s always tomorrow.

This is an area where there is actually very little difference between Sherlock’s perspective and Moftiss’s perspective. On both levels, the creation of Fat Mycroft is based on the assumption that fat is a) ridiculous b) sinister and c) morbid. 

So. Allowing that it’s entirely possible that from Moftiss’s POV Fat Mycroft is about scoring cheap laughs, what does Fat Mycroft tell us about Sherlock’s feelings about his Very Big Brother?

On the simplest level, Mycroft’s size is a representation of the way he dominates Sherlock’s psyche. In fact, this is used as one of the early “tells” about the Victorian story: when Sherlock goes to see Mycroft for the second time he asks if he’s put on weight. “You saw me only yesterday,” says Mycroft; “yet here I am, increased.” It’s not possible to ‘increase’ over a 24 hour period in real life; but you can do it in a dream, especially if the dreamer is someone who has always felt overshadowed and thwarted by you and yet at the same time is more dependent on you than he is on his parents. 

But all the play made with Mycroft’s gargantuan overeating makes it more complicated. Mycroft’s all-consuming hunger, combined with his size, make him a fairy-tale giant, laying waste to all around him as he feeds his unnaturally huge body. Fairy tale giants often eat people, so Fat Mycroft represents Sherlock’s fear of being consumed by him–a fear that would certainly be uppermost in his mind as he heads off to certain death in Eastern Europe as a result of Mycroft’s machinations. But the betting also identifies Mycroft’s eating as a self-destructive practice, the expression of a death wish which Mycroft seems to enjoy indulging. It’s another indication of how uncomfortable Sherlock is with appetites; Mycroft’s gluttony is as aggressive as Jim Moriarty’s come-ons and just as frightening. 

At the same time, though, what Sherlock is doing here is projecting his own death wishes–he has many–onto his supposedly more ‘clever’ brother, bringing him down to his own level (or rather, given the fact that conventions allow us to romanticize cocaine addict but not a food junkie, even lower). Sherlock’s brain is making this about *Mycroft’s* self-destructive behavior and not his own, which is of a piece with how just…fucking…juvenile everything about that first meeting scene is. Sherlock’s brain is attacking Mycroft the way a ten-year-old boy would, tasteless backside jokes included; it’s crude and mean and desperate and it is expressive of how much he sees Mycroft as an oppressive force which cannot be fought or outwitted but only mocked. 

So, Mycroft in TAB is certainly oppressive and almost a literal blocking figure, and yet at the same time is the only one Sherlock can trust–in the sense of revealing to him all the weaknesses that Moriarty represents. As soon as Sherlock finds the ‘miss me’ tag his mind transports him immediately back to the Diogenes Club, where Mycroft (like everyone else) becomes his analyst: “Do you? Miss him?” 

But although Sherlock clearly still wants this relationship and this trust, there are many indications that he’s also afraid that Mycroft will betray him–or rather, that Mycroft is betraying him all the time. And he’ s not necessarily wrong. When Mycroft is introduced in “Study in Pink,” it’s done from John’s point of view and we’re not told who he is. We are encouraged in multiple ways to misidentify Mycroft as Moriarty. The initial interview takes place in a deserted and darkened garage to which John has not gone entirely voluntarily and from which we’re not sure he’s going to get out alive. Sherlock initially identifies Mycroft to John not as his brother but as “the most dangerous man you will ever meet.” This is all supposedly cleared up at the end of SIP; but for me, anyway, that hint of suspicion always lingered. Mycroft’s all-powerful surveillance actually makes him Big Brother, and I do not love Big Brother. You can certainly see that in the fanfic I wrote after S2. S3 has been somewhat successful in humanizing him through the introduction of the Holmes parents; but Sherlock’s subconscious is not buying it.

Mycroft's scene with Mary is a dark inversion of that initial parking garage scene, in which Mycroft tries to get John to spy on Sherlock for him. John refuses to do it; Sherlock tells him flippantly that he should agree next time so they can split the cash, but John’s refusal to be Mycroft’s stooge is obviously a test which Sherlock  believes he has passed. Mary plays this scene like she’s John’s evil twin: she’s not only colluding with Mycroft, she’s enormously pleased about it. Even in the modern interludes–some of which, we must assume, are also dreamwork, because Sherlock doesn’t actually ‘wake up’ until after the Reichenbach Falls scene–Mycroft and Mary are doubles of each other, and it is undoubtedly distressing to Sherlock that Mary appears to actually have superseded Mycroft (she’s faster and better at everything than he is). 

What’s even worse is that when Mycroft sends his missives to Mary, they’re just signed “M.” Because “M” is how Moriarty signs off on his communiques with his operatives in “The Blind Banker.” The three characters with the M names–Mycroft, Mary, Moriarty–form another substitution chain. They’re all people that Sherlock is close to, that he cannot remove from his life, that he cannot help but depend on (if we are to take seriously Sherlock’s comment that he won’t need drugs now that Moriarty’s back), but that he also cannot trust. 





	6. THE REICHENBACH RETCON

Our journey through Sherlock’s dreamwork sadly comes to an end with the piece de resistance, the denoument, the Big Tall Wish Fulfillment, the whole point of this whole insane journey into the depths of Sherlock’s subconscious: The Reichenbach Retcon. To the viewer–to this viewer, anyway–what happens in the final dream scene of “The Abominable Bride” (bar the post-credits coda) is both tremendously satisfying and unbelievably heartbreaking. Satisfying because it’s everything we–and Sherlock–ever wanted. And heartbreaking because neither we nor Sherlock are allowed to believe, even for an instant, that it’s real.  

It is also heartbreaking for what it tells us about the role that John plays in Sherlock’s psyche, and how and why Sherlock is still–after three fucking seasons and who knows how many fucking years–his own worst enemy when it comes to his own happiness.

John is the most complicated of all the introject characters. Sherlock’s mind really seems to have trouble settling things about him. For instance, one of the things that continuity sticklers always complain about with ACD canon–Doyle’s inconsistency about when Watson’s married and when he’s not and when he’s living at Baker Street and when he’s not–is highlighted in Sherlock’s dreamwork. Initially he seems to be living at Baker Street. They certainly seem to be returning home there. Then, apropos of nothing, we see him in his breakfast room at the apartment he’s sharing with Mary, complaining to his servant. One moment Sherlock’s talking to John as if he’s there with him; then he has to be reminded that John moved out “months ago.” Sherlock can’t make up his mind about whether John is with him or with Mary. Introject John also seems confused on that score; when he discovers Mary in the 221B sitting room he has no idea who she is–it’s as if he’s literally forgotten that he’s married to her until Sherlock unveils her–and when he’s eating breakfast at his own place it takes him a while to remember that Mary’s supposed to be there with him. Now might be a good time to point out that the refrain of the eerie song that the ghostly Emilia Ricoletti sings is “Do not forget me.” The John Sherlock has dreamed up for himself keeps TRYING to forget about Mary, but Sherlock’s mind won’t let him.

In fact, as long as I’m winding this series up, let me just take up the question I have seen raised elsewhere of why it is that Sherlock seems so friendly to Mary in “The Abominable Bride.” So friendly that he really seems more into her than John does. Well, from a dreamwork perspective, I see two things going on there:

1) Mary is the Watson who’s a woman. In other words, Mary, as a female Watson, is also a female John, and therefore is a fantasy John who would be able to marry him and have his baby.

2) Mary shot and almost killed Sherlock not too long ago. He’s been SERIOUSLY hurt by her–physically and in every other way–and he’s afraid of her. He knows she’s perfectly capable of killing him, or of killing John. He may act like he likes her; his brain may actually be telling him that he DOES like her. But that’s because he believes that he HAS to like her in order to survive (or in order for John to survive). His apparent attraction to her (and he does appear to be attracted to her) in TAB is Stockholm syndrome. He’s identifying with his captor–or, as the case may be, John’s captor–in order to survive.

Both things could be going on at the same time; and I think maybe both of them are. Either way, it makes some sense of how HARD Sherlock’s dream works to rehabilitate Mary. It’s not just her role in solving the case. The problem with Mary is what? That she’s a lying, deceptive, cold-blooded killer who shoots men who don’t do her bidding. (I repeat: she does not shoot Sherlock in HLV for any reason that makes strategic sense; she shoots him because she told him she would if he took another step, and he took one.) Sherlock’s speech down in the church basement is an attempt to validate all of that by presenting it as a rational and even laudable response to Victorian-era sexism. ALL the Brides are lying, deceptive, cold-blooded killers who shoot men who have somehow transgressed against women. Like Mary, they all have secret identities which they keep hidden from the men in their lives. Like Mary, they execute their victims without anything anyone could call due process. Like Mary, they deal out capital punishment for things that the law would not consider capital offenses. But now, because we’re in the Victorian period, Sherlock can present this indiscriminate and illegal violence as progressive. All this assassination is just a tactic used to redress gender inequality. As Mary says: it’s “part of a campaign. Votes for women.”

I’m not prepared to say that Moffat doesn’t believe that bullshit. It is certainly par for his course. Let me tell you, though, that it is bullshit. Suffragettes were militant; but most of their ‘violence’ was directed at property rather than people; more to the point, they made sure people knew who was doing it. You don’t get the vote by instigating a campaign of sporadic assassinations motivated by personal resentments and camouflaged as the work of a vengeful ghost. That has no political impact whatosever, no matter how personally satisfying it may be to the women who carry it out. Sherlock may be borrowing from the history of the suffragette movement–the other broken ‘window’ recalls one of the suffragettes’ more famous demonstrations: [the synchronized window-smashing of 1912.](http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16945901) (Not actually in the Victorian period, but who’s counting, not Moftiss and definitely not Sherlock). 

Anyway. My point is: from a dreamwork point of view the resolution of the ‘case’ is basically Sherlock straining REALLY HARD to make Mary OK in his own mind. He REALLY NEEDS to be able to feel all right about her being married to John,  because at least in the near future he can’t get rid of her. And he is just about this close to doing it when Moriarty shows up and fucks it up for him.

Moriarty, little libidinal leprechaun that he is, calls bullshit on this fantasy. Reconciliation with Mary may be what Sherlock NEEDS but it is definitely not what he WANTS. It’s not until, after all the layers of onion have been peeled, we get to the Cave of the Perpetual Ejaculation–I’m sorry, the Reichenbach Falls–that Sherlock is finally able to give himself what he wants. 

Sort of.

 

John shows up in “The Abominable Bride” in more than one place. The entire Abominable Bride case is about Sherlock’s guilt over what he did to John, for instance; by giving himself a case in which his inability to figure out how the Bride can have come back from the dead is a constant source of torment, he’s putting himself through what John went through as he tried to understand why and how Sherlock faked his own death. Sherlock’s guilt and fear about what he did to John by staging the first Fall also shows up in a more complicated way in Hooper. Hooper is Molly dressed up as a doctor with a mustache who is constantly pissed off at Sherlock. In “The Empty Hearse,” after Sherlock’s return enrages John–who at this moment is a doctor with a mustache–Sherlock tries to move on by inviting Molly to help solve crimes. When Molly refers to this activity as “being John,” Sherlock says “you’re not being John, you’re being yourself;” but that doesn’t fool anyone, and he’s calling her ‘John’ before their crime scene investigation is over. So in “The Abominable Bride,” Molly is once again ‘being John’–a John who is hostile, pissed off, and secretly undermining him.

So with that in mind, let’s remember that in the modern timeline, John doesn’t grow that mustache until after Sherlock’s ‘dead’ and he doesn’t get rid of it until he’s stopped being pissed off (or at least too pissed off to have any contact with Sherlock). A mustachio’d John, from Sherlock’s POV, is a John who is inaccessible–a John who is either grieving for him or angry with him. We also hear, in TEH, from both Mrs. Hudson and Sherlock that the mustache “ages” John. Sherlock is clearly disgusted by it as soon as he sees it, partly because it makes John look so much older. So the mustache also makes John into a father figure.

One of the meta jokes in their first scene in 221B in TAB is Watson’s line that “I’ve had to grow this mustache just so people will recognize me.” From a dreamwork point of view, Introject John has grown a mustache so that Sherlock will ‘recognize’ him as the angry John he came back to, as opposed to the John he left behind. By aging John, the mustache also turns John into a father figure for Sherlock, which also reminds him that John is about to become a father, which reminds him yet again that John is now lost to him. 

Hooper calls Sherlock Watson’s “daddy” in the morgue scene; but let me just list all the ways in which this episode actually makes Watson Sherlock’s daddy:

* Sherlock throwing him the cane, and Watson catching it (see above in “A Child is Being Beaten”)

* Watson trying to discipline Sherlock (controlling his public and private behavior, telling him what to wear, yelling at him to hold himself to a higher standard, etc.).

* Watson showing up, with a gun, to save Sherlock from Moriarty’s “attentions” as if he is a father on prom night putting the fear of God into his daughter’s date.

In fact, if we go back to the gun, and the whole phallic symbol thing, and we look at the way the characters in TAB use guns…well…here’s the Bride with her guns:

OK, she’s nuts, she’s firing at random, the two gun thing is clearly overcompensation and as we know, these guns are only for show and neither of them actually hits anyone. So, don’t give women the phallus, they don’t know what to do with it apart from cause havoc. Moving on to the men, here’s Moriarty with a gun:

See, this is not even the most outrageous thing Moriarty does with a gun in TAB, and even so, it is CLEAR that he doesn’t take it seriously. Moriarty treats his gun like a plaything or a stage prop, not like something that could actually fire. And in fact when he does fire it, there’s no effect; he’s as lively as he was before. Plus what a tiny little gun, too, especially compared to the Bride’s HUGE ones.

Here’s Sherlock with a gun:

He draws it only in reaction to Moriarty, and look at this shot of them, doubling each other, with the window curtains between them and the entrance to the sitting room serving as a proscenium arch. They’re still play-acting and the guns are still toys. In fact, Sherlock throws the gun away as soon as Moriarty changes his pose, and Moriarty says, “Let’s stop playing, we don’t need toys to kill each other; where’s the intimacy in that?” With Moriarty around, that’s all the gun or the phallus is ever going to be: a toy, something to play with until you achieve the “real intimacy” that Moriarty so clearly wants and of which Sherlock is still terrified.

Well, here’s John with a gun:

Look at that face. Does that face say, “Play with me?” Does it say, “I’m a raging maniac with a score to settle?” Does it say, “I’m a steely-eyed hired killer for the CIA and I will take you out of this life with no more remorse or feeling than a child swatting a fly?” Does it say, “I’m terrified by the danger that Sherlock has once again gotten himself into?” No. It says, “All right kids, knock it off. Daddy’s home.”

John’s the only person in this dream who can use a gun “properly.” He’s the only one who can use the phallus to establish order and lay down the law instead of sending the universe whirling off into a giddy waltz of libidinal chaos. John’s the superego here, if you want to be Classic Freud about it, or the Law of the Father, if you want to go with Lacan. Moriarty doesn’t resist the Law; he doesn’t really even argue, he just whines that John’s appearance is “not fair” like he’s six years old. Sherlock is, of course enormously relieved to see John turn up at this moment, because it means he doesn’t have to go over the edge into the abyss. 

So this adds a whole extra layer of heartbreak to this fantasy. Because John’s finally doing what Sherlock must always have longed for him to do: he’s showing that he’s “smarter than he looks” by seeing through Sherlock’s ruse in time and coming back to the spot fast enough to catch him and Moriarty in the act and interrupt Sherlock’s ‘death.’ The over-the-top water action in this scene, apart from symbolizing the raging cataracts of everyone’s desires and representing jouissance (oh my God I just called in jouissance, that’s Lacan’s fault, look, really it just means the pleasure men experience at the moment of ejaculation) as annihilation, makes it look as if Sherlock is crying throughout this exchange. Cumberbatch himself may not be losing it but the ENTIRE WORLD AROUND Sherlock is telling you that he is just sobbing with relief and general verklemptness at this moment. It means the fucking world to him that Introject John has passed the test that both the ‘real’ John and the canonical Watson failed and come back to save Sherlock in spite of Sherlock’s own conscious wishes and intentions. 

“There’s always two of us,” Watson says. “Don’t you read the Strand?” It’s an obvious lie–even in ACD canon, Holmes and Watson do eventually separate–but Sherlock is just so glad to hear it, so glad that the scenario is ending this way this time. So glad that he doesn’t have to be separated from John, that he doesn’t have to make John so angry, that John will now have no reason to abandon him or withdraw his love. There will be no hiatus, there will be no Mary. Everything will be like it was before, in the old days before the fall. When John kicks Moriarty into the gorge, and says, “It was my turn,” he’s naming this execution of an unarmed man as the third in a series: John’s shooting of Jeff in “Study in Pink,” Sherlock’s shooting of Magnussen in “His Last Vow,” and now John’s execution of Moriarty in “The Abominable Bride.” Sherlock finally has what he wants: him and John together again just like they were before Mary came into their lives. 

But it’s not real. 

Sherlock’s always known this was a dream; it’s the first thing he says after he finds himself on the ledge ( “I’m still not awake”). When he calls Watson John, he finds out that John’s always been aware of that too (“Time you woke up, Sherlock”). And of course Moriarty has always had meta privileges. So nobody who’s in this scene is every all the way *in* it. And that’s heartbreaking enough.

Even more heartbreaking is the fact that Sherlock concludes the dream by firmly excluding Introject John from sexuality. John, as the Father, is the one who punishes and sets limits–the one who saves Sherlock from himself by destroying his temptations (whether morphine, cocaine, the desire to know at all costs, or Moriarty). Sherlock doesn’t ask John to dive into the cataract with him, and John never offers. The retcon unravels as the original scenario from “The Reichenbach Fall” plays out, and John watches Sherlock take his swan dive without intervening. The only scrap of dreamwork Sherlock can take into the chasm with him is the certainty that John knows he’s going to survive and therefore won’t have to spend the next…however long it is before they’re together again…grieving and being angry. Even his assurance that “I always survive the fall,” of course, assures us of nothing because we can all now hear Moriarty saying, “It’s not the fall that kills you…it’s the landing.”

So if you’re looking to “The Abominable Bride” for answers to your Johnlock questions, the Reichenbach Retcon tells you what Sherlock wants (Johnlock), when he wants it (now!), and why he’s never going to get it. Not because John is straight, or because John is married, or because John is ‘not gay’–but because Sherlock refuses to see John as someone who could fall **with** him. His own ideation of John as the straight man–the layer-down of the law–the captain of Sherlock’s frequently rudderless ship, the calm hand on the steering wheel of his fast and accident-prone car–would be threatened if John pursued him sexually, or vice versa. With all of his inhibitions apparently lowered, Sherlock STILL wants to keep John  **outside** of his appetites and desires–because he still thinks he needs John to save him from them.

Well. I’ve enjoyed doing all this TAB meta. I suppose the last question I want to take up is: Do I believe my own theory?

Because of TAB’s premise, one can put together a coherent reading of it despite its many and mammoth discontinuities, contradictions, and incoherences. But let’s face it: a lot of _Sherlock_ has all of those things, without any saving excuse. I have created this little psychoanalytic reading of TAB and I’ve enjoyed doing it; but I am not prepared to say that it is an accurate reflection of the authors’ intentions, nor do I expect it to be predictive of series 4. I’m just glad that, after the disheartening debacle of “His Last Vow,” they have actually made an episode of _Sherlock_ that I could enjoy.


End file.
